UC Theatre Cuts Hong Kong Series

Bob Graham, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PDT, Thursday, July 9, 1998

The UC Theatre in Berkeley is discontinuing, after five years, its Thursday Festival Hong Kong series. Audience saturation for some of the older films, the unavailability of others and the declining quality of the new titles were cited as the reasons.

Ruth Hayler, who programs the UC from Seattle for the Landmark Theaters chain, said she made the decision reluctantly. "I just couldn't devote one-seventh of our programming to it anymore," she said, in the face of declining attendance for the once-popular series.

One factor, she said, is that the distribution company, Miramax, has tied up the rights to most of the backlog of films by Jackie Chan and Jet Li, two Hong Kong stars making big crossover efforts to win Western audiences.

"Strong titles we'd like to show, such as Jackie Chan's 'Drunken Master II,' are no longer available," Hayler said. She'd also like to show Li's "Fists of Legend" or "Once Upon a Time in China and America," for example, but those are tied up, too.

Li makes another move into the U.S. market tomorrow with the opening of the new Mel Gibson film, "Lethal Weapon 4," in which Li plays the villain.

Hayler said the UC has "played over and over again" such classics as John Woo's "Hardboiled" and "Bullet in the Head," and the new crop of Hong Kong films does not reach that level of quality.

She tried showing the newer "Young and Dangerous" series, but it "was not as strong a draw."

Hayler said the UC will continue to show Hong Kong films on an occasional basis but not as a regular series.

There are other opportunities to see Hong Kong films. Two San Francisco theaters show them as a matter of course: the Four-Star, at 2200 Clement St., and the World, at 644 Broadway.

Beginning August 1, the Bridge in San Francisco, another Landmark theater, will screen a Saturday midnight series of Hong Kong films. The eight-week series will feature "Chinese Ghost Story," "The Bride With White Hair," "Green Snake," "Dragon Chronicles: The Maiden," "New Legend of Shaolin," "Naked Killer," "Full Contact" and "High Risk."